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1 Documenting the contemporaneity of humans and extinct animals in the New World, and thus forcing American society to acknowledge the great antiquity of Native American occupation here, was one of American archaeology’s major accomplishments in the first part of the twentieth century. From the 1920s onward, excavations at Folsom, Lindenmeier, Blackwater Draw, and other localities on the Great Plains (Barbour and Schultz 1932; Figgins 1927; Howard 1935; Roberts 1935) laid to rest the argument that Indian people had entered the Americas very recently and simultaneously revealed an early way of life that captured, and continues to capture, the imagination of both professional archaeologists and the interested public. Paleoindian archaeological sites on the Great Plains produced the bones of large mammals in abundance, bones that were regularly associated with aesthetically pleasing and technically sophisticated stone tools, particularly spear points. Throughout most of the twentieth century, both archaeologists and the public in general viewed early human groups in North American as highly mobile, technologically hypersophisticated, specialized biggame hunters, a reconstruction seen as sharply divergent from more recent, locally adapted and regionally variable, ways of life. However, the burst of interest in Paleoindian archaeology that followed the initial discoveries at Folsom and elsewhere produced many excavations but fewer in-depth reports. Furthermore, technical developments in archaeological analysis and the increasing sophistication of supporting disciplines like geology have left even the most detailed work from the early days of Paleoindian archaeology out of date. In response to these issues, Paleoindian archaeology since the 1970s has often focused on the analysis of existing collections and on reexcavating or otherwise redocumenting previously excavated sites (Boldurian and Cotter 1999; Frison and Todd 1987; M. E. Hill 2002; Hill et al. 1995; Johnson and Holliday 1997; Meltzer 2006; Todd et al. 1992; Wilmsen and Roberts 1984; and others). The accumulation of data from new sites and from reexaminations of old sites and existing collections has increasingly led to significant reevaluations of the traditional views of Paleoindian lifeways: recent syntheses have challenged these views on almost every point. This volume presents data derived from archaeological work at the Allen site (25FT50) and paleoenvironmental work in the region around this site that add to these challenges, painting a picture of early hunter-gatherer ways of life on the Plains that differs dramatically from the one that has been dominant for so long. To put these issues in perspective, and to situate the Allen site in the changing views of the Paleoindian period on the Plains, the remainder of this chapter summarizes the now-traditional view of Paleoindian lifeways and the recent challenges to it. Changing Views of Paleoindian Archaeology Laterchaptersinthisvolumedocumenttheintermittent occupation of the Allen site from approximately 11,000 cal B.C. until approximately 7500 cal B.C., a span of time that corresponds roughly to the entire post-Clovis Paleoindian period (Holliday 2000a). The collection includes no Folsom diagnostics, but the lower levels of the site clearly date to Folsom times, and the site chapter 1 INTRODUCTION Douglas B. Bamforth 2 / Chapter 1 collection includes projectile points with stylistic links to post-Folsom Paleoindian occupations on the Western Plains (chapter 10). The nearby Lime Creek and Red Smoke sites produced similar material (Davis 1954a, 1962; Hicks 2002). The Medicine Creek drainage was thus integrated with the widely known terminal Pleistocene/Early Holocene ways of life elsewhere on the Plains. Recent Views of Paleoindian Lifeways Kelly and Todd’s (1988) reconstruction of Paleoindian lifeways has provided the basis for most research on the early occupation of the Great Plains for the past two decades. In this view, the terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene saw relatively rapid, continuous , and more or less unprecedented climatic and thus vegetational change, creating patterns of animal densities and movements that were both difficult to predict and unlike anything that has existed since Paleoindian times. Paleoindian population densities were likely also very low, making it difficult to rely on neighbors for information about resource availability in distant areas. In response, human groups are argued to have focused on large game, which they pursued more or less continuously, beginning a search for new prey immediately following a successful kill. The results of this would have been frequent territory shifts, rare reuse of specific points on the landscape, group movements over very large areas, and little or no seasonal differentiation of activities or group composition. Instead of relying on detailed knowledge of the local landscape, Paleoindian adaptations have been seen as based on a flexible, raw...

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